- inspiration for jaded coders
- speculative ramblings on software development
This site hopes to muse and amuse, to inspire and conspire, and to ruminate and illuminate on the subject of programming as poetry.

Wednesday, March 30, 2016

If?

If you can keep your job when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on (downsizing,
outsourcing, technology, globalization, the fed, Obama, you?)
If you can build a reputation on a forum,
And dispense advice for free and not be snide;
If you can educate and not just bore 'em,
And take all the ingratitude in stride,
Or being hated, don’t post "haters gonna hate",
And yet don’t post too often, nor too wise:

If you can daydream—and still type all the faster;
If you can code—and not make code your aim;
If you can draw with vector and with raster,
And treat those two abstractions just the same;
If you can bear to see the code you've written,
Twisted by knaves to make a hack for fools,
Or watch the software you gave your life to, broken,
And reboot and build ’em up with trial-ware tools:

If you're fluent in both windows and ubuntu,
Or work with macs—nor lose the common touch,
If neither Haskell, Bash, nor Java code can faze you,
If all registers count for you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving nano-sec,
With sixty cycles’ worth of CPU,
Yours is the net and everything that’s in it,
And—which is more—you’ll be employed, my son.